I find this debate rather tiresome. I have been a serious photographer for 30 years. My intention is to render pictures as literal as I remember seeing them. My only "manipulation" is to render them as faithfully as possible. For me, if something is "wow", it doesn't need any extra help. In fact, it will ruin it.
* It all boils down to INTENT. The intention of the photograhs in this exhibition were to play, deceive, trick and have fun. Nothing wrong with
that, but reality is pretty cool in it's own right.

Actually ever since the advent of calotypes (aka talbotypes), where the process produced a translucent original negative image from which multiple positives could be made by simple contact printing, photographers have always done some form of retouching, including bulding composite images, mostly to produce a new form of Art. Hence image manipulation programs, Photoshop and alike, are just a nice and easy way to do this, and people who use PS do not do anything different from what early photographers were doing 170 years ago, in the 1840's. Image Manipulation programs allow them to be even more creative and artistic. And just ilke in the time of "Staklina retouching" photography cannot be a prof of anything any longer, as PS kind of software allows for almost invisible and sometimes indetectable manipulation...

Even unmanipulated photgraphs do lie. When I was in art school in the 70s there was a very oppresive attitude perpetuated by the abstract expressionists who told us to express ourselves but if that expression was representational they were absolutely dismissive. They were incredibly narrow minded, you had to adhere to "the Party line". They would say that if you were painting realistically you should just take a photograph. But the fact is the camera is incapable of reproducing what our eyes see. That's why there are so many different types of lenses. I always take a picture when I am out painting. (I paint from life). When I look at them later I am amazed how different my painting is from the photo. For example- I was talking to a photographer and I said "it's amazing, for some reason I always exaggerate the middle ground in my paintings and make it bigger than it is". He said "Do you use a 50 mm lens?" (which was the default setting in the old days before digitals and built in zooms) I said yes and he said that 50 mm lenses push the middle ground back. And as we know you can't get a good exposure of a light sky and dark buildings. You have to go for one or another. And there is no color in the shadows and the color in general is not representative of what we really see. HDR is an attempt to solve some of that. And then of course there is parallax. You can't take a photo of a tall building without it narrowing in an exaggerated way. Everything in a photo is a compromise and if you get one thing you lose another. The human eye is still better even after years of technological advancement.

Also, the famous Iwo Jima photo (actually a still of a film) of Marines raising the flag was re-staged for the War Department photographers. In fact, after 9/11, the same staging occurred with firefighters (ensured to be multi-cultural, of course) at the site of World Trade Center disaster--taking the idea from the Iwo Jima photo.

even without retouching a photo the image can be a lie.
simply by changing your point of view, selectively choosing a background, etc.
choosing a bad expression on for a candidate.
they are all lies.

that being said, that's just the medium: art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

Its an interesting exhibition at the Met; its great to hear more about early photographic manipulation and how its been a longstanding tradition--not just a contemporary or fine art photographic approach.

Several famous Civil War post-battle scene photographs were "staged" to be more dramatic by the photographers by dragging the dead bodies of fallen soldiers in the camera's field of view for better alignment than where the soldiers actually fell to their deaths.

Chrystia Freeland's summarization of the Kuznets Curve is not really right. Kuznets argued that as a country developed, inequality would initially increase, then max out, and then decrease as the country further developed. This seemed to borne out in developing, advanced industrial societies up into the 1970s. But the US leads the way in defying this prediction in the past 30 years.

As an undergraduate architecture student, the work of Jerry Uelsmann opened my eyes to the power of precision within a manual, collage-based technique. Glad to see him represented in the show.

http://www.catherinecouturier.com/assets/images/artists/Jerry%20Uelsmann/untitled_1982%20copy.jpg